Jean Marie Montali

That’s what these parents thought. Education, knowledge, freedom, science and all these other subjects that are taught in the schools of the Republic, it can quickly rot the head of an indoctrinated child. What’s the point of filling religious dogma into the heads of kids if a teacher from the Republic wants to stuff something else into them? Brainwashing leaves no room for anything, and especially not for freedom. Independence, emancipation, free will, it doesn’t fit the dogma. Moreover, these words have synonyms: independence, deliverance, emancipation, autonomy. Blasphemous words, like caricatures. And like them, words that are now deadly? For the fanatics, worshippers of the knife and bomb cult, nothing apart from the Koran, its 114 surahs and some 600 verses! Instruction? Work of the devil! Intelligence and knowledge? Sorcery! Ignorance is the manure of fanaticism, nothing else and it is useless to twist it. A few centuries ago in Europe, we burned our witches and sorcerers, or at least the unfortunate ones judged as such by bigots crazy about God. Today, we attack journalists with choppers, we slit the throat and decapitate with kitchen knives a teacher unworthy of treading on the land of Allah. But Holy Name of God, Conflans-Sainte-Honorine is not the land of Allah! It is the Republic! The secular Republic! One is free to believe or not to believe, to pray or to blaspheme, because blasphemy is a non-crime against a non-being, as long as one has not proved the existence of God. God, we believe or not. Shocking or not, God is a non-being, like Santa Claus, Gargamel or Grouchy Smurf.

In France, a long time ago, we kicked the asses of priests and nuns, because we didn’t like to see them snooping around in the neighbourhoods, around our young people trying to convince them. We thought it was taking us back to the darkness, to superstitious ages. You have to understand us too: we grew up with the classics and the humanists. Irrationality wasn’t our thing, especially as it often turns into fanaticism. The monotheistic illusion that pursues the dream of the triumph of a single god in the whole world did not please us at all. We were in favour of another universalism. The republican universalism that leaves everyone his or her freedom of conscience. Priests and nuns quickly got rid of their cassocks and cornettes, because it was nothing more and nothing less than underhand proselytism, a visual aggression for us miscreants and believers of another religion. May they blend into the Republic, in the name of God! We took Christ on the cross out of the classrooms, because God’s law does not have to impose itself in the public, secular and republican school. What is true with the God of the Catholics must also be true with the God of the Muslims: he must remain at the door of the school.

Are the caricatures outrageous? Vulgar? Sometimes even obscene? What’s the big deal? It is to better denounce the obscenity and vulgarity of power when it is abused. You have to be stubborn not to understand this: caricature is a counter-power. It also serves to better condemn the disgusting manipulation exercised by so-called doctors of the faith, false prophets and true madmen, who contaminate the spirits to the point of making them believe that holiness is in the murder of innocents. May God feed on blood and tears. They are the true blasphemers: they disfigure the image of God to make him a being in their image, barbaric and bloodthirsty. The caricatures are violent? So what? A caricature has never killed anyone. The violence of its line denounces the violence exerted on spirits and people by merchants of illusions who solicit by promising glory and paradise, where there is only oblivion and nothingness.

What’s wrong, in the minds of these madmen, not to understand that it is not caricature that provokes fanaticism, but the opposite: it is fanaticism that inspires cartoonists.

Another thing: caricature existed before God, Jesus, Allah, the prophets and all the saints. In ancient Egypt, the omnipotence of the priests was already caricatured to denounce their hold on the spirits. In France, during the War of Religions, the Catholics portrayed Calvin as a pig, and the Protestants turned the Pope into a donkey. Before and during the Revolution, Louis XVI was drawn as an excrement and Marie-Antoinette as a prostitute. But it was not until the cartoons of Mohammed that journalists were murdered, an editorial staff massacred, a teacher beheaded. While those who would like to squirm over the tomb of this true martyr, wondering, with a penetrating air, if he too hadn’t tried a little bit to be murdered, shut up. You have to be really contaminated to think such a thing. Just as a caricature does not provoke fanaticism but is inspired by it, freedom of expression is not responsible for an execution. It is fanaticism, and fanaticism alone is the culprit.